Angola’s coastline could become Africa’s next great tourism asset

Luanda, June 2026. For more than a century, tourism destinations have competed with the same tools: hotels, resorts, convention centres, beach clubs. Dubai, Singapore, Barcelona, Miami and Cape Town all have them, and the experience is starting to look the same too. Speaking at the Global Tourism Forum Angola Investment Summit 2026, V-Marine founder and chief executive Wael Joujou argued that the next opportunity for tourism lies somewhere the industry has largely ignored: on the water itself.

His keynote, “Yachts & Floating Destinations: The Missing Tourism Asset”, opened with a simple observation. Ask almost any traveller whether they would like to spend a night on a yacht and nearly all say yes. Ask how many have actually done it and the number drops to a small fraction. “That isn’t a demand problem,” Joujou told delegates. “It’s a format problem.” Nautical tourism, he said, has been left niche, complicated and hard to book, when it could be as easy as choosing a hotel, a villa or a boat on any booking platform.

From green oil to blue oil

The argument found a receptive audience in Angola, a country working to diversify its economy beyond oil. Angola’s Minister of Tourism, H.E. Márcio de Jesus Lopes Daniel, has described tourism as the nation’s “green oil”, a sustainable engine for jobs and growth. Joujou proposed taking the idea one colour further. Angola, he suggested, should also look to its “blue oil”: the ocean, the coastline and the water-based experiences that remain almost entirely untapped.

The framing was meant to build on the Minister’s vision rather than compete with it, and it became the phrase most associated with the talk. More than 70 percent of the planet is covered by water, Joujou noted, yet less than one percent of it has ever been shaped into a tourism experience.

The vertical paradox

At the centre of the keynote was an idea Joujou calls the “vertical paradox”. Along desirable coastlines, a narrow strip of waterfront land becomes extremely valuable, while the water in front of it, the very thing that creates that value, goes unused. “The water creates all the value,” he said, “yet it has a high value and no price.” The result is a wall of development crowding the shore, and an ocean treated as scenery rather than opportunity.

The alternative, he argued, is to move beyond the waterfront and onto the water: floating hotels, overwater villas, yacht stays, floating beach clubs and marina destinations that add to a country’s hospitality capacity without using up its coastline.

Lessons from the Maldives, Venice and Monaco

Joujou pointed to places that turned difficult geography into a signature asset. The Maldives, a thousand scattered islands with little land, turned that constraint into the overwater villa, now one of the most recognisable tourism products in the world. Venice lived with its flooding rather than paving it away, and the water became its identity. Amsterdam used floating properties to solve a shortage of living space, and they became an attraction in their own right.

Monaco offered perhaps the sharpest lesson. With one of the shortest coastlines in the world, roughly four kilometres, it reached a global audience through yachts, marinas and nautical culture. Joujou put the question directly: did Monaco attract the wealthy because it was already rich, or did building a world-class marina ecosystem make it so? His answer favoured the second. In his view the luxury segment is the anchor that draws wider tourism demand, rather than a decorative extra.

Connectivity and the floating future

The keynote also looked ahead to technology that could reshape coastal tourism: battery-powered seaglider vessels able to cover long distances over water quickly. By solving the connectivity problem that has long held back islands and remote coastlines, such craft could open up places that are hard to reach today, and make the trip between coastal sites feel closer to a taxi ride. Joujou noted that V-Marine is developing floating terminals as part of this new infrastructure, and expects these technologies to take hold over the next five years.

An invitation, not a pitch

Joujou presented the talk as a starting point rather than a proposal. Angola’s coastline runs for more than 1,650 kilometres and takes in four distinct coastal environments: urban, beach, rocky, and the rare sight of desert meeting the sea. He said he has not seen that range matched anywhere else in the world.

He closed with the line that became the keynote’s signature: “Whenever you see blue water, don’t see the end of the land. See the start of a new tourism activity.”

The World Tourism Forum Institute featured the keynote in its official summit coverage under the headline “Angola’s Coastline Could Become Africa’s Next Great Tourism Asset”. For Angola, and for a continent with more than 30,000 kilometres of coastline, it may prove one of the most valuable ideas to come out of Luanda.

Related posts on LinkedIn: ITB Berlin 2026 and the Angola Investment Summit.